I had a weird problem: #Emacs would reliably lock up any time I tried to save a file on a drive mounted over sshfs. Turns out Emacs lock files (weird symlinks that don't point to actual files) where somehow not interpreted correctly over sshfs. Emacs ended up in an infinite loop trying to create and verify the symlink. My solution was to simply disable lock files, like this: (setq create-lockfiles nil). I've never had any use for them anyway 🙂